Every Sunday, I make the same stupid mistake.
I open Medium, Substack and LinkedIn, hoping to find something fresh on marketing, PR and search. Something sharp. Something useful. Something that might actually help explain where this whole messy business of discoverability is heading.
And every Sunday, I end up knee-deep in the same SEO slurry.
Content. More content. AI visibility. Citations. GEO is just SEO. SEO is dead. SEO is not dead. AI traffic is tiny. AI traffic is meaningless. Topical authority. Content velocity. Semantic clusters. The same self-appointed gurus, the same recycled LinkedIn sermons, the same desperate effort to make old deliverables sound relevant in a market that has clearly moved on.
It is not just repetitive. It is not merely dull. It is actively damaging.
Because while the SEO industry's loudest voices keep shouting about citations, traffic graphs and "visibility", the people holding the budgets are asking a very different question:
Where's the revenue?
And that, right there, is why SEO is becoming less attractive as a marketing channel.
Not because search has stopped mattering. Not because Google has disappeared. Not because AI has somehow rendered discovery irrelevant overnight. But because the SEO industry is increasingly presenting itself like a channel obsessed with metrics nobody commercially serious gives a toss about.
That is the real problem.
SEO is not dying because it has no value. It is being made to look uninvestable by an industry leadership class that seems incapable of talking like marketers, precisely when marketing thinking is most needed.
That's the tragedy. Search still matters enormously. But its gurus are making it look like a chocolate fireguard...totally useless.
And this MUST change.
So, in this article, I'm going to rip the SEO guru class and their nonsense apart.
The latest pile of SEO dross: citations
Let's start with the latest bit of industry nonsense: citations.
A citation, for anyone lucky enough not to spend their life wading through SEO commentary, is the source link attached to an AI-generated response. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or whoever produces an answer, and somewhere beside it or underneath it sits a little link showing a source that helped generate that response.
Fine. That is a citation.
And in itself, it has very little marketing value.
Yes, there might be a slight branding effect. Your logo might appear. Your name might be seen. In rare cases someone might click. If you are very smart, and your visual assets are distinctive enough, there may be a tiny advertising halo in being seen as one of the underlying sources.
But let's not disappear up our own arses here. Most people do not read an AI-generated answer and then immediately dart off to the source panel like a caffeinated intern searching for a footnote. The whole point of generative search is that the answer has already been assembled for them.
So the citation itself is not the prize.
The generated answer is the prize.
More specifically, whether your brand, product or service is mentioned in that generated answer is the prize.
Whether you influence the recommendation, shape the shortlist, appear in the relevant commercial context or become part of the answer the user actually consumes – that is where the value sits.
And the fact that the SEO industry keeps blurring the difference tells you everything.
Because "get your content cited more often" is not really a strategy. It is a metric. A soft, reportable, conveniently vague metric. The sort of metric you reach for when the old model is wobbling, and you need a fresh dashboard to keep the client calm.
Think about what that actually means in a board meeting.
The SEO agency shows up. Clicks are down. Organic traffic is declining. The CMO looks worried. So the agency opens its laptop, pulls up a new dashboard, and announces that citation volume is up 41% quarter-on-quarter. The room goes quiet. Nobody knows what to say. The agency has bought itself another quarter.
That is the game. And it is a game the industry has played before.
And that is exactly what this is.
SEO has always loved whatever was easiest to sell
Let's stop pretending the economics of SEO were ever particularly noble.
Links were hard. Real link acquisition was slow, expensive, labour-intensive and difficult to scale. That is why specialist link-building outfits and digital PR agencies exist. They were doing the painful part.
Technical SEO, for all the theatre and geek cosplay, was never the main profit centre for most agencies either. It is specialised work, dependent on developers, constrained by platforms and often impossible to implement properly in big businesses. No serious enterprise brand is handing the keys to its site architecture over to some overconfident SEO consultant in a black hoodie.
But content? Content was lovely.
Content could be packaged, sold, outsourced, margined, scaled and reported on. It fitted beautifully into monthly retainers. It sounded strategic while remaining mostly operational. It produced charts. It filled roadmaps. It created movement. It gave agencies something they could sell again and again and again.
So content became the heart of the SEO business model.
Not because it was always the most valuable activity. But because it was the easiest thing to industrialise.
And now the entire trick is being exposed.
Google has steadily reduced clicks from informational search. AI systems are now taking huge swathes of informational demand and answering it directly. The old story — "create lots of content, get lots of traffic, and eventually good things happen" — looks shakier by the month.
The really telling thing? Most of that traffic was never particularly valuable to begin with. It was informational traffic. People with questions. People who wanted an answer. They got it from a blog post written by a junior copywriter, and then they left. Nobody measured what happened next because measuring it would have revealed how thin the whole operation was.
So what should the industry do?
Rethink the channel. Reposition the discipline. Start with outcomes. Talk about how search influences revenue. Behave like proper marketers.
Instead, the gurus are doing what frightened industries always do when their old playbook stops working.
They are inventing a new metric to protect the old business model.
"AI visibility" is what you say when you have run out of proper answers
Imagine you are a CMO.
Someone tells you that you need SEO. Fair enough. Historically, that meant discoverability, demand capture, visibility for relevant search terms and, in the best cases, revenue.
Then your SEO lead or agency tells you traffic is down. Organic clicks are declining. Search behaviour is changing. Google is answering more itself. AI is intercepting informational intent.
Reasonable enough.
So you ask the obvious follow-up question: what exactly are we trying to achieve now?
And back comes the answer: citations. AI visibility. Presence in generative search.
At which point any sentient adult should stop and ask: why?
Why do I need citations? What does AI visibility actually do? How does it influence sales? How does it improve profit? How does it affect market share?
And that is where the whole rotten thing starts to wobble.
Because the CFO is not impressed by a graph showing "AI visibility up 34%". The board is not handing out applause because your blog was cited 9 times by a chatbot in informational queries. If revenue is flat or declining while some abstract visibility metric is rising, the conversation gets ugly very quickly.
As it should.
This is not even a new problem. SEO has always had this weakness. Traffic up, conversions down. Content output up, pipeline flat. Rankings rising, commercial impact negligible. For years, too much of the industry got away with the lazy assumption that any visit was a good visit, because at least someone had seen the brand.
But people searching for informational queries were always selfish. They wanted an answer. They got the answer. Then they left. AI has not invented that behaviour. It has simply removed the middleman.
And now the industry's answer to that is to ask businesses to care about citations.
No wonder SEO is becoming unattractive.
The stupidest argument of all: "AI search sends hardly any traffic"
Then there is the other bit of guru drivel doing the rounds.
"AI search sends tiny traffic."
Well done. Incredible insight. Nobel Prize stuff.
The implication, of course, is that because AI search is currently small in traffic terms, it must therefore be commercially unimportant. Which is exactly the sort of brain-dead, traffic-addled thinking that got SEO into this mess in the first place.
Paid search teams have long understood that tiny volumes of the right traffic can be worth a fortune.
That is the whole point.
Paid search has never needed massive traffic to justify its existence. It needs commercially valuable traffic. High-intent clicks. Bottom-funnel demand. Users closer to a decision. People searching with wallets half open.
Nobody in paid search cries because the best-converting query only sends a modest number of visits. They care because those visits make money.
And that is the bit the SEO gurus keep missing when they sneer at AI search volume.
AI search may still be relatively small. Fine. But if it sits closer to recommendation, comparison, evaluation and decision support, then it can punch far above its weight commercially. Small traffic can still mean serious revenue. In fact, some of the most profitable marketing channels work exactly like that.
Here is a more useful way to think about it. A user opens an AI assistant and asks: "What's the best project management tool for a 50-person agency?" The system produces a shortlist. Three tools appear. One does not. That is not a traffic event. Nobody clicked anywhere. But the commercial consequence is real. The brand that appeared is now on the consideration list. The brand that did not is invisible at a decisive moment in the buying process.
Tell me that does not matter. Tell me that is "tiny traffic" and therefore irrelevant.
So when an SEO influencer dismisses AI because "it hardly sends any clicks", what they are really revealing is their addiction to traffic as a vanity metric.
They are still thinking like people who grew up worshipping graphs.
Commercial marketers know better. The question is not how big the traffic is. The question is what the traffic means.
If AI recommendations influence preference, shape the shortlist or surface your brand in buying situations, then its value can be significant long before the traffic graph catches up.
Paid search learned this years ago.
SEO is apparently still catching up.
What matters is not citation. It is availability
This is where the industry needs to stop talking like technicians and start talking like marketers.
The thing that matters is not whether your content got cited. The thing that matters is whether your brand is present, mentioned and recommended in relevant buying situations.
Call that AI availability.
That is a sensible idea. It actually means something.
Physical availability is about ease of purchase. Mental availability is about coming to mind in buying situations. AI availability is the likelihood that AI systems will surface, mention or recommend your business, product or service when those same buying situations are expressed through generative search.
That is a proper objective.
Not "our citation count increased this month".
Not "our AI visibility score went up".
Not "we were mentioned in seven generated responses about informational nonsense no one was ever going to convert from anyway".
The real question is whether you are becoming more available where commercial choice is being shaped.
And once you frame it like that, the route forward becomes obvious.
You do not build AI availability by worshipping citations.
You build it by increasing the supply of relevant information, contextual brand mentions and credible signals around your products and services across the web.
In plain English: you promote the bloody business.
You sharpen your positioning. You improve your copy. You create clear product and service pages. You get mentioned in the right places. You show up in the right comparisons. You get included in listicles, reviews, category conversations, industry coverage, social posts and third-party references that real people actually consume.
That is not narrow old-school SEO.
That is marketing.
Which is precisely why so many in SEO seem completely lost when the conversation moves there.
What this looks like in practice
Here is where I want to be concrete, because I suspect some readers are nodding along but still wondering what they should actually do differently.
Take a software company selling to operations teams. The old SEO playbook said: publish 30 blog posts about operations topics, chase rankings for informational queries, capture top-of-funnel traffic and hope the pipeline eventually notices.
Some of those posts might have ranked. Some might have driven modest traffic. Almost none of it was converting at anything resembling a meaningful rate, because the people reading "what is operational efficiency" were researchers, students and competitors – not buyers.
The AI availability version of the same budget looks very different.
It asks: when someone in an operations role asks an AI system for a shortlist of tools to improve team workflow, do we appear?
When a procurement manager asks what the best-reviewed solutions in our category are, are we in the answer? When a journalist, analyst or industry blogger writes about this space, do they mention us?
If the answer to those questions is no, the problem is not your content calendar. The problem is your market presence. Your positioning. Your coverage. Your reputation outside your own website.
And fixing that requires less blogging and more actual promotion. More product marketing. More PR. More partnerships. More presence in the conversations where your category is being shaped.
That is a different job. It requires different skills. And it explains why SEO agencies that built their entire model around content production are struggling to make a credible argument for what they do next.
The future of search is less optimisation and more promotion
This is the bit that really seems to upset the white-hat priesthood.
Because much of what appears to work in AI-influenced discovery looks less like classical SEO and far more like PR, communications and brand positioning.
Listicles work.
Third-party mentions work.
Tier-one, tier-two and tier-three publisher references work.
Social content works.
Comparison pages work.
Clear contextual mentions of your brand and offer work.
Why? Because generative systems need evidence. They need associations. They need enough relevant information to infer that your brand belongs in the answer.
That is why all this increasingly looks like a promotion problem rather than an optimisation problem.
You are not just tweaking your way into visibility. You are building the web's understanding of who you are, what you do, where you fit, why you matter and when you deserve recommendation.
And yes, loads of idiots will abuse this. Of course they will. They will spam listicles. Flood the web with garbage. Generate thousands of useless pages. Create synthetic brand mentions and fake authority signals and every other bit of digital shithousery they can get away with.
That always happens.
But that does not change the strategic reality underneath it.
AI search is fundamentally a supply issue. The brands most likely to be recommended are those that supply sufficient coherent, relevant, repeated, and contextual information for the systems to use.
That means more strategic communications. More thought about where your brand needs to appear. More attention to message, positioning and proof.
In other words: more actual marketing.
The real scandal is that SEO should be cleaning up right now
This is what makes the whole thing so maddening.
In theory, this should be SEO's moment.
Businesses are worried about AI. They are worried about disappearing visibility. They are worried about how generative search changes recommendation, discovery and demand capture. They are actively looking for help.
This should be a golden era for the search industry.
Instead, too many of its leaders are banging on about citations because that is the only way to preserve the old content machine.
Tool vendors do it because they need new surfaces to monitor and report on.
Agency owners do it because their business model was built on selling content at scale.
Influencers do it because their worldview was formed during a period when traffic growth covered a multitude of sins.
In other words, they are not responding to what the market needs. They are defending what their own business model needs.
And that is how industries start to die. Not because their underlying channel has no value, but because the people leading them refuse to talk honestly about what that value really is.
That is the current danger with SEO.
Not extinction. Self-inflicted irrelevance.
Not technological collapse. Commercial cowardice.
There is a version of this industry that could be thriving. A version that says: we understand how commercial intent moves through discovery channels. We understand how search behaviour, AI recommendations, and brand signals interact. We know how to make your brand available at the moments that matter. We can connect that to revenue.
That version of the industry would be drowning in inbound right now.
Instead, the loudest voices are debating citation counts and arguing about whether AI traffic is statistically significant.
Search is still hugely valuable. Organic visibility still matters. High-intent demand still matters. Brand discovery still matters. But if the industry keeps framing the future as "citations", "visibility scores" and endless content commentary, it will continue making itself look less credible, less serious and less investable.
And that would be one hell of a stupid way to go.
Because the fix is not even complicated.
Stop selling citations.
Stop reporting vanity.
Stop pretending a reference link is a strategic objective.
Start with the buyer. Start with intent. Start with category demand. Start with revenue. Ask where your brand needs to appear, how your product should be described, what associations need building and which communications actually move the commercial needle.
Less content theatre.
Less metric wank.
More availability.
More promotion.
More market reality.
The future of search is not another dashboard built to justify the old retainer model. It is a messier, more strategic, more commercial blend of SEO, PR, positioning and communications.
That is what makes it exciting.
And until the gurus grasp that, they will keep doing exactly what they have done for the past: turning a valuable channel into an unattractive marketing joke.
Andrew Holland